Running a business without an online contact has become difficult to imagine, as it is said that you can live without eating or sleeping. Almost every company is doing something online. So far, there is a strong tendency to rely on platforms such as Naver, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, but in the future, proprietary media will become more and more important.

Even today, many companies already feel that a website is important. However, from a marketing standpoint, the level of website creation today is extremely low. This is because the practice of creating a website without properly understanding and thinking about how to use the website for marketing has continued for a long time.

Many websites are built and maintained on the set of a movie or TV set, or in a theme park, with only the exterior walls and nothing on the back.

In this article, we'll talk about 7 things that are easy to overlook when creating a website that is the backbone of your marketing.

1. Structure

1) Content management system

Websites, like social media platforms, need to be constantly updated with content. Commerce website stakeholders understand the importance of a content management system because products change and because continuous updates directly affect sales. However, most of the people involved in websites that don't have commerce capabilities don't understand this.

Even if content uploads are infrequent, it is often necessary to change the target visitor or the message to them slightly as the company's circumstances change. However, if you create a website without considering a content management system from the beginning, even minor content changes are complicated and difficult.

solution

You need to create a website for content management to work well. Of course, it is difficult to develop a proper management function with a reasonable budget, and there are very few companies that need to create a separate management system.

Creating a website with WordPress solves 99.9% of content management system problems. If you have created a website with WordPress, it is important to establish a business system that allows stakeholders to upload and edit content.

2) Site structure

problem situation

The site structure referred to here is user story/site UX, or more simply, page menu structure. It's easy at first glance, but difficult to get right. As with all levels of one-page text, it's hard to do things that are seemingly simple.

Site structure requires the ability to design and understand the shape and role of the various touchpoints that users first visit and exit to a website. You should also have a clear understanding of the goals users want to achieve through the website and the goals the company wants to achieve through the website. And the user flow (site structure) that meets both of these needs to be identified and implemented.

solution

If you have a website with commerce capabilities, you need to find out the exact reason users are visiting this website and not elsewhere, and organize your pages and features to match that reason. For a website without a commerce function, think of the website as a company introduction, but think of it as interactive and three-dimensional content.

You have to list the content and continue to organize and adjust the content for the parent and child pages and front pages. This may take longer than you think. The ideal environment is to change the website structure as needed from the viewpoint of content update, test user reactions, and find the best way.

3) Page structure

problem situation

Page structure is important for Search Engine Optimization. Search engines understand some things that look exactly the same to humans, and some don't understand them at all.

Many websites do not follow this page structure properly. Imaging text and not distinguishing header or body are typical examples. Creating websites and content in this way will make it difficult for you to succeed in search engine optimization. Of course, if you don't have this much understanding of the web, content, and online, marketing itself won't work.

solution

image-text

The text should be text and images should be imaged. It is far from the custom of making landing pages or detail pages in Korea, but this is the norm. Even if you have a detail page created for an open market or product page, in some cases, it needs to be reprocessed for search engine optimization. Don't make images of text for website banners.

text

Be sure to follow the text header tags properly. Separately write h1, h2, and h3 tags and body according to the title and header.

2. Inside the website

1) speed

problem situation

If you are trying to create a visually attractive website or a website with many features, you may need to use CSS and JavaScript in a complex way. Hosting or the shape of the content on your site also affects speed.

If your website is slow, your visitors will churn. It gives a bad impression of the company even to visitors who are patient and do not churn.

As you go through the different stages of building a website, it's easy to overlook the speed issue. In the final inspection stage, since the person in charge visited the site several times, it is easy to see that the site is in a cached state, that is, all the contents are stored on a computer or mobile phone. The real first-time visitor experience is that your site is slow, but your reps mistakenly believe it is fast.

There are many factors that affect the speed of a website besides the creation of the site. It's hard to speed up a website without an understanding of hosting and domain issues, and the overall delivery of web content online.

solution

The first thing to watch out for is a site speed Measurement Tool such as Google. The speed improvement suggested by the measurement tool is generally correct, but the number of these measurement tools and the actual website speed is often not very relevant. Trying to match the score of the measurement tool can ruin your site. When measuring speed, look at your speed directly on multiple devices. A bad score in the measurement tool is fine as long as the actual speed is fast.

a. Good service and use of tools

Because speed has so many variables, it's hard to pinpoint one solution. In general, you can use a combination of good hosting and domain service (I think domestic services lack features or are too expensive for their features), CDN, image processing and hosting, and in the case of WordPress, an appropriate caching tool. Finding an agency that cares about speed is also simple.

2) Security

problem situation

A website that is not secure. Since a variety of useful information is exposed as it is, there is little possibility that any damage may occur. Using an unsecured website is like riding a motorcycle without a helmet and thinking that it's okay because you haven't had an accident.

However, domestic users and companies do not seem to be very concerned about this. Seeing that there are still many websites that are not secure. The reason why website security is so important in marketing is that it is a matter of impressions besides the damage caused by security. When I visit an insecure website, the first thing I think of is 'that this company doesn't even do this simple thing, and it lowers the credibility of the company very much.

solution

Substitute text for website security.

It doesn't take much time and money to secure your website.

Cost: Free ~ Less than 100,000 won per year (Additional cost for multi-sites, etc.)

An expensive part of enforcing security is the cost of the certificate. The cost of a certificate is usually less than $100,000 per year for a single site. For multi-domain or large-scale enterprises, it can be solved at hundreds of thousands of won. You can also get a certificate for free. free certificate issued by https://letsencrypt.org.

Time: less than 1 hour

When a certificate is issued, the certificate must be applied to the server side. Reboot the server 1-2 times by entering a few lines of commands and you're done. Usually, the certificate sales site or the issuing site kindly provides guides for each server type.

Ask the website builder

Ask the manufacturer who made the website you are to don ay to apply security. If you charge a small fee, you can judge the cost by referring to the criteria presented above.

Others Problems

Others are important but difficult to group into a specific type.

1) Image processing

problem situation

Images are all related to many of the things mentioned above. It's not a separate topic conceptually, but I mention it because it's important because it relates to many things. Images that usually go into website content are hard work. However, in the process of work, we do not think about the speed of the site or its relevance to the search engine. Images on many websites look fine to the eye, but not on websites and search engines.

solution

a. Image Alt Text

Use image alt text except in special cases. Image alt text allows search engines to understand the keywords in the image.

b. Resizing and resizing for the web

• Fits the size and resolution of the image for the web.
• Separate image hosting and use of optimization tools

Images take up a lot of space. Therefore, if you upload images to your web server or hosting as they are and use them, the burden increases as your site grows. It's a good idea to store your images on a separate hosting and allow your website to optimize them for loading. For example, Ballast connects Amazon S3 with imgix, which is set up and used by the website again.

2) Mobile

problem situation

A website that doesn't look good on mobile gives a strong feeling of neglect, no matter how well created and run.

solution

The solution is either one. Creating a separate site for mobile, or making a website responsive. There are pros and cons, but I prefer responsive websites. When you create a responsive website, you don't need a separate mobile domain, and you don't need to manage your website and content accordingly.

Don't Abandon Your Website

If a popular celebrity has a history of abandoning pets or evading responsibility for human relationships and is known, subsequent activities will be very difficult. A company with a poorly built website and poorly maintained website has a similar impression, but it doesn't show immediately and is less noticeable.